Immortal Barrier is Bugged

General Discussion
1

Edit 2: even further testing -

The bug only seems to occur on friendly units, so breath a sigh of relief Protoss players!

Original thread:

Co-posted in Bug report Forums. I was messing around today, going through the protoss tech tree with a friend to better help him understand the general protoss tech tree, when we came across this bug.

The Barrier is supposed to absorb the first instance of damage up to 100 shields. If the barrier absorbs more damage than that, it’s supposed to break and transfer to the shields underneath.

This isn’t actually the case - instead, the barrier breaks and any damage remaining is simply ignored - see the following:

https://gyazo.com/b5b5829c6b3e3fd6fdbbe27a668c3919

The gif above shows what I’m talking about.

The disruptor procs the immortal’s Barrier (145 damage + 55 to shields for a total of 200 damage) however it ignores the remaining 100 damage on breaking the barrier.

For reference, the damage is supposed to be counted towards the 100 damage that the barrier absorbs, as stated in the patch notes here:

Immortal

  • Barrier will now also block the first instance of damage which triggers the Barrier.

Community Council Comment: Counts towards the 100 damage blocked by the Barrier.
Currently EMP hitting an Immortal will drain all of the Immortal’s shields as well as activating the Barrier, which will generally expire before the Immortal ends up receiving other damage, making the ability lose value in the mid game against Terran.

Edit: Following further testing, the bug currently effects the following units, resulting in significant wasted damage:

Widow mine (100% of damage absorbed, 70 damage wasted)

Yamato (100% of damage absorbed, 140 damage wasted)

Siege tank (1st damage absorbed, 2nd shot breaks barrier and wastes the remaining 40 damage)

https://gyazo.com/1cc714fbd3e71b60d5566f803a841bf3

Liberators (1st damage absorbed, 2nd shot breaks barrier and wastes the remaining 50 damage)

https://gyazo.com/ba993406233cb42a5bd9597489cbe2eb

Tempests (1st 2 shots damage absorbed, 3nd shot breaks barrier and wastes the remaining 20 damage)

https://gyazo.com/04e235a369948fdb0fd833e9f214d06a

Thors (1st attack damage absorbed, 2nd shot breaks barrier and wastes the remaining 20 damage)

https://gyazo.com/808b568babffc31ed902623eb170a4da

Ravager Bile: (1st shot absorbed, 2nd shot breaks barrier and wastes the remaining 20 damage)

https://gyazo.com/28206b1af6c10fe2f57d434e32257399

  • Effectively, any high damage unit in the game will be particularly effected by this change, but theoretically it could also effect smaller units such as marines - however high dps low damage units apply damage fast enough that this almost wouldn’t matter.

When the barrier breaks, any remaining damage is nullified regardless of whether it’s the first instance of damage, instead of overflowing to the immortal’s shields underneath.

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2

Thanks for bringing this up. Hopefully this is actually possible to fix, since it may potentially affect other behaviors, such as Defensive Matrix in CO-OP.

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3

Not just Coop.

Given that it directly effects disruptor damage, the same applies to widow mines and Yamato as well.

It could potentially apply (though I have yet to test this) to siege tanks (if they break the barrier, the remaining damage could potentially be nullified too), tempests, Thors or generally any high burst damage unit. I’m uncertain as to this behaviour though as, again, I haven’t tested that yet - Can’t use the unit tester since it’s not up to date currently.

Edit: Testing this in the editor now - it fully blocks 2 siege tank shots on the immortal one after the other.

3 Likes
4

What I mean is that if the Barrier effect can block damage beyond its “modify limit” of 100 from a single attack, then this probably affects other effects that are designed the same way.

The COOP Swann version of Defensive Matrix uses the same implementation. Modify fraction of zero & modify limit of 200.

I would assume that whichever attack “breaks” the Barrier gets fully blocked, even if some of its damage is supposed to overflow.

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5

Pretty much exactly this; regardless of how much damage you do, all the damage is blocked with Barrier being active.

3 Likes
6

Ok, so you can’t one-shot an Immortal. At least it makes some sense verbally. :slight_smile:

7

There is nothing in the game that can deal 400 damage in one strike, but that’s missing the point.

The point is that abilities like Barrier and Defensive Matrix are supposed to block a fixed amount of damage. It is a problem when they can block more than that. If it is decided that these abilities should block more, that should be a balance change, not the result of a bug.

2 Likes
8

It was a pun.

EDIT: it’s probably a bug, if an Immortal can take two tank shots, and not lose shields. It absorbs then more than 100 damage.

They didn’t implement damage overflow, most likely (tank example).
With Disruptors, there is another complication: 145 damage is, AFAIK, first instance damage, so it’s blocked (zero damage).

This damn Barrier is causing problems for years.

9

That right there makes it painfully obvious that Barrier is only supposed to block up to 100 damage. It is never supposed to absorb more than that.

11

That’s a bit of a nasty bug. Also, frankly, it’s a good buff and it makes sense to me. They should consider making this an official buff in the future if it’s not overpowered.

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If Blizzard or the balance team decides that they want Barrier to block more damage, then that should be done as an actual change to its damage threshold. Not as a bug that affects other stuff.

13

What does it impact though? Spells like EMP? Make Disruptors crappier? Stop Ravager bursts from wrecking Immortals as easily?

I’m not seeing where this bug actually becomes a balance problem.

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14

It simply makes the Barrier quite a bit of stronger in various scenarios. So, Immortals are stronger, than intended.

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15

If a unit either inflicts more damage than intended, or absorbs more damage than intended, that is a balance problem.

For instance, Immortals completely ignoring a Disruptor shot because of Barrier, absorbing 2x the intended damage. That is a problem.

16

Given that - as I’ve stated in the (edited) original post - the bug seems to only effect friendly units, nothing major - at least right now.

However, if the bug effected enemy units on occasion, then it would directly change the number of hits siege tanks take to kill it, for example. And liberators. And basically everything else I listed.

1 Like
17

How ridicculous are you?

Disruptors don’t damage allied units.

Nobody said immortal shield isnt supposed to break after it absorb more than limit amount of damage. It is breaking, and when it does there isnt “shield above”.

18

There is no any bug with the immortal damage shield absorbtion, you dont understand how it is intended to work. And it is work as it was intended.

19

Immortal shield is designed to block unlimited amount of single strike damage. Its not bug. Pledging here for pro information in the form of bug accusations is the lowest way of trying to reach better ladder positions.

20

Yes they do.

Barrier explicitly says that it blocks “up to 100 damage”. It is not supposed to block a single point more than that.

False, if that was the intention than Barrier would state that, and it wouldn’t have a damage threshold or the ability to block more than one attack.

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21

The tooltip states: “absorbs UP TO 100 damage”. If it absorbs ONE POINT more, in some cases, then this statement is FALSE.

2 Likes